I run an executive think-and-do tank called REX, where we harness the forces that are ripping business, government and society inside-out. Before this, I worked for a dozen years as a tech industry analyst (half of them writing Release 1.0, a tech newsletter that put me at the 50-yard line of the tech revolution), and then headed off on my own to advise startups and consult to BigCos about the future they were heading into.
Raised in South America and curious about everything, I'm a pattern finder who connects things in ways a lot of other people miss.
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Not "Who invented the Internet?" -- How!

This two-part post is the brainchild of Dave Witzel and Jerry Michalski. Dave’s info is at the end of each post.

Continuing our discussion of L. Gordon Crovitz’s misunderstanding of the development of the Internet, perhaps the most interesting lesson from the Internet’s birth is not the fact that the U.S. Government and private corporations cooperated, but how they did.

On their own, private corporations could not have invented the Internet. They were never aimed toward such a thing, because an open Internet would not have created enough places to “lock-in value” — to create artificial scarcities from which to take profits.

The success of the Internet itself is a demonstration of how hard it can be for business or government to unilaterally declare global standards. After all, TCP/IP (the networking standard underlying today’s Internet) wasn’t supposed to become the global networking standard. While it was being developed and implemented, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was developing a competing framework called OSI. In 1988 Network World ran the article, “Users must prep for TCP/IP-to-OSI move: Experts say migration to standard is inevitable” and reported “while TCP/IP has a huge and growing base, it is bound to be uprooted and supplanted by OSI … because OSI applications will offer more functionality, while the lower layers will be more reliable and easier to customize for any particular user’s internetworking demands. In addition, more vendors will support OSI than TCP/IP…” That same year, the U.S. Government even announced that it was adopting this new protocol.

But it never happened. TCP/IP’s widespread adoption persisted and continues to grow today. OSI was defined, but never widely implemented. There are plenty of examples of similar efforts that failed. The US Government tried guiding tech companies toward a common Unix standard called Posix, but all the vendors wanted to differentiate. Like cats, they scattered, and it wasn’t until years later with Linux Torvalds’ friendly invitation that Unix converged — on Linux, built atop none of the commercial systems.

International Telecommunication Union (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While the Internet was being birthed, the phone companies of the world were busy building AIN, the Advanced Intelligent Network, under the aegis of the ITU (International Telecommunications Union), the U.N. body that now wants to assert its control over this Internet. It’s beyond the scope of this post to describe how un-intelligent the AIN looks in retrospect.

The Internet was a clever hack of most major existing communication systems. It was built by researchers outside the profit spotlight, funded by public and private money and personal effort. Its developers came together to architect a system that would simply carry packets from one place on Earth to another as well as possible, letting the packets follow disparate routes and even get lost along the way, and then reassembling them into useful streams on the far side. These engineers’ ethics were baked into the code they wrote, so the system favors egalitarian treatment of bits and doesn’t truck much with ways to create scarcity and differentiate commercial offers.

Once business woke up to the Internet’s value, an event that fortunately took a while, the dynamics began to change, cusping in the Dot-com bubble, yet continuing to grow at an amazing pace ever since. Such bubbles happen with all new infrastructure: there was a canal bubble, the South Sea Bubble, multiple railroad bubbles and more. Irrational exuberance seems a common symptom of the private sector.

We should note that the Internet would never have been born without the commercial networking hardware that already existed and the commercial telecommunication systems it could hack and piggyback on, plus all the engineers and managers whose salaries were paid for by private companies (often under Government contracts). The majority of the Internet’s infrastructure is operated by the major telecom players, and in 2012 they are expected to spend $70 billion.

But to plop credit for this whole thing at the doorstep of one corporation – Xerox or any other — is the height of hubris or just a sign of ignorance. More likely, it’s a pretty bald-faced attempt to make a political point about the perfection of the market system, at the cost of that poor, inefficient, bureaucratic Government.

As an aside, Jerry Michalski, one of the authors of this piece, gave a talk to Xerox’s senior management — then-CEO Paul Allaire and all the senior execs — in the early Internet days, as the Bubble was brewing. He pointed out how PARC had helped invent several of the technologies that were now all over the new infrastructure, including the graphical PCs connected to it, and he exhorted them to use those piece parts to innovate and climb to greater heights.

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Just ran across a resignation post by the lead author of the OAuth 2.0 spec. What he writes is a cautionary tale that resonates with our posts here: http://hueniverse.com/2012/07/oauth-2-0-and-the-road-to-hell/